Preparing beverages by means of decocting ingredients in a solvent is often used for preparing various drinks or traditional Chinese medicine beverages. For example, preparations of traditional Chinese medicine are made by decocting herbs/plants used as (raw) ingredients in hot/boiling water used as solvent until solids/compounds (i.e. active nutrients) contained in the ingredients are extracted/diffused in the solvent. After a given period of time, ingredients are taken out of the solvent, and the resulting beverage is ready for drinking. Traditionally, this process comprises the following steps:                Preparing the ingredients: pre-sizing (e.g. slicing and grinding), cleaning the ingredients. The ingredients could also be in powder form.        Soaking: putting the ingredients into cold water for a certain time. The purpose of this step is to get water to enter into the cell structure of ingredients so as to later facilitate compound-extraction in the solvent.        Decocting: putting ingredients in a recipient with boiling water, so that compounds are extracted from the ingredients in the water.        Filtering: separating the ingredients from the solvent so that users can consume a clean drink without residues.        
However, such a process is not convenient for a user, because it requires a lot of successive steps, and also because the extraction can take up to a few hours; in other words it takes a very long time before the beverage is ready for consumption. To speed-up the process, a user may be tempted to shorten the time of decocting, but in that case nutrients might not all be extracted from the ingredients, resulting in a beverage which is not optimal as regards the solids/compounds contained in it, thus affecting the taste or the efficiency on user health.